I am a Principal Engineer in the Open Source Programs Office at Amazon.
This is something we are very aware of, and discussions about this cross my desk weekly.
One big problem of the many problems I face regarding such proposals is the people who are the best at writing open source who need the money the most are not the people who are good at writing grant proposals and are good at sucking the money out of such funding systems.
I'm the Principal Engineer for the Open Source Program Office at Amazon. We've gotten much better about being responsive and inclined to open source projects like that.
Email me at [email protected], and tell me what the internal code names for your projects were, and were you were in the org. I'll see what I can do.
My elisp config file dates back to 1986. It's almost entirely unchanged. It still works. I have never had to remove anything because it stopped working. I just occasionally add stuff to it every few years.
About 5 years ago, Hewlett-Packard tried being a paid GSuite customer, paying for tens of thousands of seats, with a path to onboarding the entire company. We could not get support, or even a TAM who would answer their phone.
After a year, HP dumped GSuite, and went to O365 instead. We got a responsive TAM, full multi-tier support, and white glove handholding for migration. And, I think it was cheaper, too.
There is NO level of spending as a customer at which Google actually gives a shit.
What this tells me that there probably exist deeply weird images that would be recognized as something by one person or by very few people, but would be just an unrecognizable mash of colors and lines to everyone else.
I wouldn't say they "compete", at least, not harmfully. Maria and Percona swap patches with each other, and are drop-in replacements for MySQL. Drizzle is an exploration of the idea of paying off as much as possible of MySQL's technical debt and throwing away crufty backwards compatibility. The technical ecology of users and developers around MySQL is healthier than it has ever been.
Percona Server exists because Percona has a great deal of deep hands on knowledge about MySQL tuning and internals, and has a live-or-die commitment to making MySQL work well, and taking patches from it's user community.
Maria and Percona server advance more or less together, and routinely swap patches back and forth.
DrizzleDB exists because some of the MySQL developers decided that Doing It Right was more important than maintaining old targets and maintaining backwards compatibility.
There is plenty of room in the MySQL user and developer ecology for both approaches. If you need MySQL, and you don't trust Oracle, or don't want to pay them, just swap in MariaDB or Percona Server, they are drop-in replacements. In fact, you should drop them in away, they have more bugs fixed and are more performant than stock Oracle MySQL.
The employees were expensive software developers, electrical engineers, RF signal electrical engineers, and microelectronics design engineers. There probably was one person making minwage. She was a very sweet developmentally disabled girl who delivered the mail to our desks.
I'm the OP. After few years of bad IT hell, the rest of the company was almost completely dead in the water, in part because of the bad IT drag, and in part because of other management decisions that had bad outcomes. I then left when it was gutted with layoffs. A few years after that, it was sold for pennies on the dollar prices to a low-quality technology aggregration company.
That is totally on brand for "progressives", especially west coast ones.